This anthology of drawing remains a “work in progress” to ensure artists and their work are accurately presented. Work on this collection of drawings began when Jerrold Morris was invited by Gallery Stratford in 1979, to organize an exhibition of twentieth century Canadian drawings to be shown during the Stratford Festival season. The exhibition became the nucleus for a book to create greater awareness of Canadian drawing partly in response to “the lack of leadership offered by Canada's art institutions which, with very few exceptions, have gathered only the skimpiest drawing collections; and even the most exceptional are of necessity often stored in areas inaccessible to the public.” It is unfortunate that many people continue to regard drawing as a minor art form, at best a preparatory stage for elaboration in another medium. The lover of drawings has the advantage of being in close contact with the artist's original concept conveyed in a relatively uncomplicated medium.

Drawing, in its widest sense of the term, is the linear element in art least susceptible to manipulation by what Blake called “blotting,” and the Pre-Raphaelites called “slosh” - we call it “fudging.” Among painters are many masters of camouflage, what Ingres meant when he said that drawing is “the probity ( virtue, integrity, honesty ) of art.” In our appreciation of drawings we are not involved in the tiresome search for the “important” work, nor are we preoccupied with scale. We can accept and enjoy, very small statements on paper which would be thought totally inconsequential on canvas.
More important is the fact that we do not have to concern ourselves with trends or fasions. Though modified by modern sensibilities, the art of drawing retains its traditional virtues. This anthology begins in 1880, the year when the number of professional artists in Canada had grown to the point where the formation of a National Academy had not only become desirable but necessary. It was also the year in which the National Gallery of Canada was founded.

A celebration : the Drawing Society of Canada chose to include this anthology in our Gallery of Canadian Drawing Masters to celebrate the endless fascination of images called drawings, their mystery and their mastery of skill, created by masters of the fine art of drawing, both past and present, both celebrated and relatively unknown.

Links: Where possible, individual artists in this anthology have been linked with known websites that feature the artist and his or her work, including the honourary members of the Drawing Society of Canada whose works and biographical summaries are featured in the Gallery of Canadian Drawing Masters .

Acknowledgments and Disclaimer: This anthology of over one hundred years of Canadian drawings was first written as “100 Years of Canadian Drawing,” by Jerrold Morris and published in 1980, by Methuen Publications. The Drawing Society of Canada undertook, as an educational research project in 2001, to locate the original text and image files from which the book was produced and to obtain written permission from the publishers to include the artists and their works featured in 100 Years of Canadian Drawings in the Gallery of Canadian Drawing Masters .

After an extensive search, we have discovered that the publisher no longer exists in Canada and Methuen Publishers Ltd, the parent publisher in London England, has no record of the book or its production files, nor is the title and its rights currently published by them. Hence all our efforts to obtain rights to the book and our attempts to locate the original material in the book have been exhausted. Therefore the Drawing Society of Canada is not responsible for any omissions, errors, copyright violations, or incorrect data in its efforts to include this anthology in the society's educational initiative of our online gallery. We also do not make any claim that this anthology represents all of Canadian drawing and the masters who have created them. The author himself said, “my search left me with a relentlessly nagging suspicion that many more undiscovered drawings were lurking in obscure places.” Hence we press on to discover Canada's great past and present in the fine art of drawing. We have, in addition to transcribing the actual text of the book, taken the creative liberties of rephrasing some of the author's commentary to give a better understanding of the material. The addition of the word “over” in our title “Over One Hundred Years of Canadian Drawings,” is designed to reflect the ongoing legacy of Canadian drawing which has survived and grown for an additional twenty years and more since the original publication of Jerrold Morris' book.

During Canada's colonial period, the pictorial record was largely the work of artists who were neither native-born nor immigrants. Canada's pictorial record was created by transient artists. The majority were army officers who had been trained at military establishments such as Woolwich, where the English watercolour painter Paul Sandby was a drawing instructor. There remains a rich store of this artistic and historical material in the various archives across the land, but much of it remains unpublished.

By the mid-nineteenth century this artistic and historical record was amplified by immigrants whose work was not only directed to a European public's appetite for information about Canada and North America, but also to a local public who enjoyed various illustrated publications about their newfound homeland. Much of the immigrants' work was achieved in the watercolour medium because of its suitability for on-the-spot reporting and ready transformation into prints and magazine illustrations. These immigrant artists worked for magazines such as Canadian Illustrated News and other publications.

The subject matter favoured by artists in colonial times ranged from coastal scenes, townscapes and landscapes, to vignettes of garrison life, native and settlement life, and increasingly as time went by, to westward exploration.

In Quebec the early emphasis was on portraiture and religious paintings, commonly executed in the Baroque style. Because so much of the art produced in the colonial period was “for the record,” it tended to lack vitality and its value remained largely historical. More provocative was the work of untrained artists whose visions were not shaped by preconceived notions that were learned in art schools and academies.

Many of the artists who made journeys to Canada's West to record native life, were inclined to present indians as an exotic compendium to the landscape, with drawings often a work of the artist's own imagination. Even in the case of portraits, we get the impression that many of them were done from memory based on formula images. Artistic views of the land and its natives were largely romantic views, idealized by artistic conventions. Possibly between the presentation of native people as exotic additions to the landscape and their treatment as subject for romantic literature, such as the legendary Pocahantas who in 1616 was received in England as a princess, or Chateaubriand's Atala published in 1801 with illustrations by Gustave Doré, or Longfellow's The Song of Hiawatha in 1855, lies our failure to come to terms with native Canada in that great land we now all share. Like the indians, the inhabitants of Quebec were molded into stereotypes by Cornelius Krieghoff ( 1815-1872 ) in mid-century. To view Canadians as other than strereotypes including the rolly-polly figures created in the manner of Flemish painter, Peter Breughel ( 1525-1569 ), we must again turn to the work of amateurs, who drew men and women as individuals familiar to our everyday understanding.

The Royal Canadian Academy was founded in 1880, under the partonage of the Governor General of Canada, the Marquis of Lorne. The aims of its founders were the same as the aims of those who prompted the establishment in 1768 of the Royal Academy in England during the reign of George III. Aims of the Royal Academy and the Royal Academy of Canada were to maintain professional standards, raise the social status of artists, facilitate a wider distribution of their work, and hence improve market conditions for the sale of artwork.

At its inception, the Royal Academy in England numbered among its members most of the finest artists of the day. Although there were later defections, the Royal Academy continued to be an influential body until the early years of the twentieth century. The same situation existed in Canada a century later. Charter members of the Royal Academy of Canada included Canada's most highly regarded artists. Art of the period was often referred to as “academic,” even though the artists whose works were so labelled did not necessarily belong to the Academy. Nevertheless, art referred to as “academic,' was art created according to acceptable standards set by academies everywhere, in other words, “academic” art meant “official” art and was often determined by governments whose exhibitions such as the Paris Salon, made the academy's stancdard public.

Because artists depended on patronage for their livelyhood, it was of vital interest that they gain admission to these “official” exhibitions, which usually meant membership or some association with existing academies. The academic era introduced the public and marketplace to the politics of art. Even though the academies supported artists they approved of, they were often restrictive, resisting changes which might undermine their authority to guide public tastes, tastes that were molded by drawings and paintings by members of the Academy. The struggle to open the doors of official art became the driving force of nineteenth century revolutionary activity by artists. In Paris the breakthrough came in 1863, when Napoleon III, in response to pressure from artists who were excluded from the official Salon exhibition, permitted the organization of the Salon des Refusés , to be followed in 1884, by the establishment of the Salon des Indépendants .

By the end of the century this battle had been won, but in the meantime many artists had suffered hardships at the hands of the exclusive juries. All too often, private collectors showed more discrimination than did official bodies. While the Musée du Luxembourgh, owing to indignant protest from the Institut, was refusing to accept seventeen canvasses from the Caillebottee bequest, a collection that included works by Renoir, Sisley, Cézanne, and Manet, individuals such as the Russians Tschoukine and Morosov were acquiring masterpieces which finally enriched the Hermitage Museum in Moscow, and Americans in Paris were buying French paintings which are the pride of museums throughout the United States today.

In Canada progress toward freedom of expression was delayed for a generation. The American Era dragged on long after the opening of the twentieth century. Indeed, it was not until after the First World War that any significant awakening can be detected in Canadian art to the climactic changes which had taken place in Europe since Impressionism. The great innovators of the nineteenth century had been thoroughly investigated. No one as yet seemed to have tried to find in the works of academicians those qualities which can be appreciated in the light of contemporary taste. Because the best Canadian artists of the period, corseted by popular taste, were guided into conservative channels, we may expect to detect their true talent in works never intended for public exhibition.

While drawings of the Colonial period abound, those of the last decades of the nineteenth century have been hard to come by. A flourishing school of painters in watercolour existed during this period, with some works considered to be drawings enhanced by watercolour. The dearth of drawings of the 1880's and 1890's may be explained by the fact that drawings were regarded, if at all, as preparatory studies for paintings, and therefore are to be found in sketchbooks, of which few have survived. Drawings that do exist from that time, reflect in some measure the preoccupation of artists at that time. Landscapes remained a primary concern, followed by subjects dealing with current events and everyday life, in the home and on the farm. Portraits continued to be in demand along with religious paintings, and few historical “fancy” pictures. Increasingly, however, as time progressed, western subject matter became popular.

The main difference between the art produced in the academic period and that of Colonial times is its increased professionalism, brought about my emigration of artists to Canada and the large number of native-born artists who had studied abroad. Study abroad had greatly diversified the sources of influence on Canadian art. In the Colonial period these were largely derived from England, but now Paris influence predominated, with some contribution from the Dutch School of the Hague and the American Hudson River School.

Because of the intense interest in the expanding western frontier, many artists made their way to the great plains and the Rockies before the region was opened up the railways. Yet, at the same time a continued interest in portraiture, figurative work, and mural work, brought to drawing a great deal of detail and finish.

In the summer of 1970, John R.Taylor, a staff member at the Ontario College of Art & Design, in Toronto, discovered a large number of drawings by a group of artists active at the turn of the century. This finding at the college brought to light the existence of an unofficial society of artists who had adopted the motto “Nulle Dies Sine Linea,” which translated means approximately, “No day without drawing.” Apparently its members, who made a living by working in print shops and engraving houses, banded together to encourage each other to produce an original drawing in their leisure time every day. Many of the drawings found at the college were inscribed “N.D.S.L,” and some were dedicated to fellow members. It appeared the “club” was operative between the years 1891 and 1907.

Although it was by no means uncommon for artists to be obliged to earn a living by commercial work, it is nevertheless touching to learn of a group so anxious to assert their dignity as artists as to take such a determined and practical step and complete commercial work as well as fine art drawing. For example, Notman's Photographic Studios in Montreal employed fine artists and Grip Printing & Publishing Co., employed members of the Group of Seven. Some members of the drawing club “Nulle Dies Sine Linea,” were:

The following information about NDSL, was obtained by Gerrit Verstraete from the Archives of the Ontario College of Art & Design, and added to this account of the academic period in Canadian art.

Our ( OCAD ) records show a reference in the book, Canadian Landscape: As Pictured by F.H. Brigden. Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1944. "The letters N.D.S.L. are the insignia of an inner group of the old Toronto Art Students' League. The letters stand for the Latin motto, Nulla dies sine linea -- Not a day without its line. The members of the group having agreed to make a sketch each month, a meeting was held monthly, when results were eagerly looked over and exchanges made." Unfortunately, we have not written records of this group, nor of the Toronto Art Students' League -- these may be resident in the Ontario Archives or the Toronto Archives.

What we do have of NDSL drawings are a couple thousand original N.D.S.L drawings, each numbered and briefly described by John Taylor. They are all very small in size. The collection includes 915 drawings by C.M. Manly (1855-1924), 366 drawings by Robert Holmes (1861-1930), 45 drawings by A.A. Martin (1876?-1954), and many individual drawings by other artists, including Mrs. Adamson, F.H. Brigden, George Chavignaud, Coleman, J.W. Cotton, Harriet Ford, Arthur Goode, H. Hancock, A.H. Howard, C.W. Jefferys, Lucius R. O'Brien, S. Strickland Tully, J. Thomson Willing, W.J. Wood and others not yet identified. ( note: many of the drawings are inscribed to Manly, which confirms the quotation above re: exchanges - C.M. Manly Drawings )

In c.1973 John Taylor curated an exhibition of the Manly and other N.D.S.L. drawings. An un-dated Press Release in the OCAD Archives reads as follows "The exhibition has followed the pattern of a Broadway show. It was opened a year ago, in Cobourg, Ontario by Paul Duval and has since toured to Trent and Laurentian Universities and to the public galleries in Sarnia, Whitby and London. It now makes its Toronto debut at the Ontario College of Art gallery, "Gallery Seventy-Six", at 76 McCaul Street on Thursday, November 14th."

Robert Holmes Drawings: The following information in our Archives -- on the front page of the Finding Aid to the Robert Holmes Portfolio. written by John Taylor.

"This portfolio was found in storage at O.C.A. during the early summer of 1970. It is presumed to have been placed in storage shortly after the death of Mr. Holmes in 1930. The Portfolio includes work covering forty years of Robert Holmes Career. The earliest drawing is catalogued as H-1 and is from the year 1890." State of the Collection is as follows:

Unfortunately OCAD has neither an Archivist nor a Permanent Collection Curator. The Library is the custodian of the collections but we can do little else but store the drawings, because of lack of staff and resources. We have John Taylor's records and a rudimentary Archives Finding Aid -- but a great deal of work remains to be done. ( The information was obtained from Jill Patrick, BA MLS, Director of Library Services, Ontario College of Art & Design )

Then came the Barbizon influence. The Barbizon School , a designation given to a group of French artists, took its name from a village in the Forest of Fontainebleau where they visited to paint the surrounding countryside. Sometimes known as “The Men of Thirty,” from the 1830's, they brought a fresh approach to landscape painting, and by the mid-century they had become extremely influential. Anti-classical in their approach, they formed a link between the Romantic movement and the French Impressionists. Among them, Jean-François Millet, one of the great draughtsmen of the nineteenth century, started a vogue for peasant subjects which spread throughout North America. The result was a flood of paintings representing farms and farm workers viewed in somewhat sentimental light.

Popular art and the illustrators found their identity in the Toronto Art Students League , founded in 1886. Membership in the Lague consisted of artists in commercial work who met for study and sketching trips. From 1892 to 1904, the League published an illustrated calendar. Artists worked as cartoonists and illustrators for major Montreal and Toronto newspapers, as well as private publications such as “Canadian Illustrated News,” “Chronicles of Canada,” “The Picture Gallery of Canadian History,“ and “Canada's Past in Pictures” which was published by Ryerson Press. Some of the illustrators such as Edmond Joseph Massicote, specialized in customs, costumes and details of early Canadian life. Jefferys even managed employment with The New York Times and Massicote illustrated the Nos Canadiens d'Autrefois , published in 1923.

In the last decades of the nineteenth century Canadians flocked to Europe to complete their art training, especially Paris. Most of them attended the Parisian École des Beaux-Arts , or schools such as Julian's or Colarossi's. Among their teachers were the renowned academicians Cabanel, Gérôme, Carolus-Duran, Boulanger, and Bouguereau.

Academies in Paris, as did academies everywhere, insisted on “correct” drawing; in fact, students were not encouraged to proceed to painting classes until they had satisfied the formal requirement of correct drawing from their plaster casts, and later the academy drawings completed in life classes. There was also a renewed interest in Roman and Grecian subjects such as the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum. As a result of this formal process, even the least talented were able to produce respectable drawings. Not that such training has no value, because even the greatest talent can only achieve its potential through devoted study and application. Tintoretto wrote, “good drawings can only be fetched from the casket of the artist's talent with patient study and sleepless nights.”

What most Canadian artists brought back from Paris was competence to produce the typical “salon” paintings and drawings. Some were able to raise their drawings above competence with an inborn talent that went deeper than schooled facility. Such drawings had vision, that capacity to express perception of both psychological and physical aspects of subjects. Many of Canada's bests artists received instruction from one such artist, William Brymner, who in 1885 returned from Paris to became a teacher at the Art Association of Montreal. George Agnew Reid was an academician par excellence who became President of RCA in 1906, and was Principal of the Ontario College of Art & Design from 1912 to 1928. Sidney Strickland Tully was one of a number of women who were able to pursue careers of professional artists in the second half of the nineteenth century. Previous to that time such a pursuit was difficult, if not impossible. One particular artist was the Quebec visionary Ozias Leduc, who despite his relative seclusion yet with total integrity, especially since most of his career comprised that of church decorator, eventually attracted the attention of a group of devoted admirers. His private vision, at first reminiscent of eighteenth century masters such as Chardin and Greuze, brought him in his last years to embrace symbolism as a personal style. Other artists included:

As we “close” the era of the academies, or at least acknowledge that the academic era never really closed, and that it only needed to make room for new thought and new vision in fine art, we enter the era of impressionism. The radicalism of the French Impressionists who first exhibited in 1874, consisted in their scientific study of light and colour, which led them to apply paint in small strokes of pure unmixed colour to give the effect of light striking on surfaces.

The universal effect of their discovereies on their followers in North America was to cause them to lighten their palettes without abandoning their primarily naturalistic intentions. In other words, Impressionism was widely adopted in a superficial manner. Apart from the direct contact with Impressionism in Paris which infulenced some Canadians studying there, the most important connection with the movement was established through the expatriate artist james Wilson Morrice. Morrice returned to canada frequently until the First World War, and painted around the Isle d'Orléans with Brymner, Cullen and Edmund Morris. He also exhibited regularly with the forward-looking Canadian Art Club in 1907. Because of the close relationship he retained with his native land, and his frequent painting trips there, he has rightly been claimed as one of Canada's greatest masters, but the style he evolved was purely French. His influence on Canadian art was profound, and may be traced to the next generation in the works of gagnon, Robinson, Lyman, and Jackson. Other artists included:

The intention of the Group of Seven, formed in 1920, was to create a national school of landscape painting. The style they adopted turned out to be the combination of a restrained use of Fauve colour with a swirling Art Nouveau line. Because their aim in depicting the Canadian scene was in the main painterly, most of their drawings which have survived are working plans for paintings: indeed one suspects that they were made only when circumstances prevented the painting of oil sketches on the spot. Although Thomson did not live long enough to become a formal member of the Group of Seven, his work can only be considered in that context. Like most of the members of the Group, he began his career by working as a commercial artist for the firm of Grip in Toronto. As with many other artists of the period, they sought to amplify their income by producing prints of various kinds, including silkscreens. The two members of the original Group of Seven who values drawing as a medium in its own right and not simply as a preparatory stage in the painting process were Lismer and Varley. Like all fine draughtsmen, they constantly practised their art, and a large number of their drawings have survived. Edwin Holgate was invited to join the group in 1931. The Group of Seven included:

In the late 1920's a favourable climate was developing for the emergence of non-objective art in Canada. Artists such as Lawren Harris and Fred Housser were propagating the doctrines of Theosophy, and Kandinsky's ( 1866-1944 ) book, “Concerning the spiritual in art,“ ( Dover Publications ) was becoming widely known. Theosophy meant “being wise in divine matters.” It established a relationship between the human soul and the divine through contemplation and speculation and aimed for a consequent attainment of superhuman knowledge by physical processes. Bertram Brooker's exhibition at the Arts and Letters Club in Toronto in 1927, was the first non-objective exhibition of its kind in Canada. Although Harris towards the end of his life reached for total non-objectivity, most of his late works are abstractions from nature. His final solutions sought to represent forces which Theosophists believed to be invested in the universe, but the mystic powers he tried to evoke did not emerge. Lionel Fitzgerald, from Winnipeg, was the third of this non-objective group who was a great influence on Brooker. But their collective paths to abstraction nevertheless retained as their starting point the perceptible world. Artists include:

The return to Canada of John Lyman in 1931, after about eight years in France, brought to attention the more formal aspects of Canadian Impressionist Morrice's work ( 1865 - 1924 ). Lyman had also studied under Matisse. In 1939, Lyman founded the Contemporary Art Society in Montreal, which sought by means of exhibitions to introduce the work of contemporary European artists, and to encourage in its members an interest in “the formal qualities of art and a broader subjective response.” In drawing this meant a new approach to the validity of line taking precedence over the definition of human form, much like the drawings of models by Rodin. The new forms of linear drawing also echoed Art Nouveau and the drawings of Gustav Klimt, and became a reminder that drawing depended on its linear quality and had nothing to do with the medium used. Artists include:

In the early 1900's there was an upsurge of interest in regional subject matter and social realities spurned by the Depression brought about a renewed interest as well in subjects related to the urban scene rather than landscapes.

A number of artists in the 1920's, possibly influenced by similar interests in the United States, turned to regional themes, endowing such genre as landscapes and farmhouse subjects with an intense sense of presence of people who inhabited these places. Even though many times figures do not actually appear in the drawings their presence is felt nevertheless.

In 1933, the Group of Seven was absorbed by a larger organization called the Canadian Group of Painters. The purpose was to widen the scope of both membership and regional representation. However, although their aim was similar to that proposed by the Contemporary Art Society in Montreal, the new group had to contend with the dominating influence of the senior founding members in order to strike out in new directions.

Of more impact on the Canadian art scene than the arrival of Brandtner in 1928 or Lyman in 1931, was the return of Pellan in 1940. Brandtner has landed in an alien environment in Winnipeg, and was little heard from until his move to the East in 1934. Pellan, on the other hand, having spent fifteen years in Paris, came fresh from association with Picasso, Léger and Miró; and he brought with him a number of canvases which, when shown in Montreal, created a considerable sensation. Of this exhibition, Jacques de Tonnancour wrote: “What French Canadian art needed, in order to be resurrected after these centuries of lethargic slumber, was a vigorous blow from the outside and Pellan provided just that blow.”

It was he who set in motion a revolution in the artist and student body in Montreal which finalley led to the sweeping aside of academic restraints and the formation of groups such as the Automatistes and the Plasciciens. Pellan, the individualist, belonged to none of these, but provided the initial momentum for change. In Paris his main affiliation was with the Surrealists, and that movement has remained one of the main sources of his powerful imagery throughout his career.

Two of Canada's greatest artists, Milne and Carr, were contemporaries of the Group of Seven. Milne was the “economist,” who never added a touch to a drawing or painting beyond he point where he considered that he had achived his aim, and Carr, the heroic figure who resolutely decided to tread the path she had laid out for herself as an artist, with no help and much frustration. Carr's contact in later life with other artists who appreciated her achievement was intoxicating, and led to her final flowering.

The 1940's were turbulent years in Quebec. That Borduas and his friends were involved in revolutionary politics is evident from the manifesto Refus Global published in 1948. This was the culmination of the struggle against academic officialdom sparked by Pellan's return to Canada in 1940. It resulted in Borduas's dismissal from the teaching staff of L'École du Meuble. In the same year, the Contemporary Art Society, of which Borduas was president, was dissolved due to internal dissentions. The “Automatistes,” as his group came to be known after their 1947 exhibition, were dedicated to non-objective art of a completely spontaneous unpremeditated kind. Of course, the source of the movement was Surrealism.

Emily Carr sat herself down before the trees and transformed them into living emblems. After her no artist could go into the forests of British Columbia to paint without inviting comparison with her work. They could, however, continue to seek in nature forms which could be used to symbolize aspects of human experience or consciousness. Two of these were the West Coast painters Shadbolt and Jarvis. Shadbolt stated: “To me a nature cycle - phases of seed growth, flowring, withering and dying of plants - is an apt paraphrase of the human cycle.” Tangled natural forms would convey a sense of emerging energy frustrated in a strugge for release, as turbulent forms underwent a matamorphosis into human figures and living emblems.

The Drawing Society of Canada , founded in 1998, and the online, educational "Gallery of Canadian Drawing Masters," founded in 2003, feature the honourary members of the Drawing Society of Canada . These honourary members, and all Canadian drawing masters as yet not discovered ( though we search faithfully ) comprise the legacy of Canadian drawing beyond the hundred years from 1880 to 1980, covered by Jerrold Morris' book, "100 Years of Canadian Drawings." Some of the society's honourary members appear in Jerrold Morris' book and are repeated in the list below.

Alphabetical list are 198 artists ( last updated October 2, 2006 )Those names appearing in bold face are honourary members of the Drawing Society of Canada